An Analysis of Discourse in the EFL Classroom (Special Issue of the Faculty of Economics)

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This paper analyses spoken discourse between the teacher and the student in the English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom. The 45-minute coversastion in the classroom was entirely recorded and analyzed in terms of discourse marker ok, interactional sequences, and speech act. The analyses revealed that the language used in the classroom contained various functions of interactional sequences and speech acts that are observed in authentic, natural communication, although it lacked the naturalness in terms of syntax, lexis, and fluency because of the student's low proficiency of English. It was also found that the teacher used a variety of meanings of discourse marker ok. Furthermore, the analyses suggested that there existed power in the relationship between the teacher and the student. The teacher controlled and manipulated the topic to follow and many interactional sequences explicitly and implicitly. These results suggest that communication is an intertwined activity socially, cognitively, and linguistically even in a non-naturalistic setting of a classroom as Hatch (1992) claimed, and discourse analysis is a beneficial tool to evaluate approaches to language classrooms and explore new application in language teaching (Jaworski & Coupland, 1999; Schiffrin, 1999)
2008-07-15